Think of a time when someone did something for you that was totally unexpected. It’s a wonderful feeling to get help when you really need it or to have someone do a huge favor for you. To receive assistance from another person also involves giving up control and depending on another.

The first widow, whom Elijah encounters, shouldn’t be in the Bible to begin with. The thing is, she isn’t even a part of this story, technically speaking. This is the spiritual history of the Jewish people; she’s from Zarephath, in Sidon of Phoenicia (modern-day Lebanon).

“This poor widow . . . . has contributed all she had.” College-student volunteers working in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake were, as you would expect, culture-shocked at the living conditions of most people they encountered in their attempts to help with cleanup. But what stuck Tom, a student from a Catholic university in the Midwest, was not the peoples’ poverty but their generosity.

We ask forgiveness from our God who saves us.

"She, from her poverty, has contributed all she had.” Poor widows play leading roles in the vivid stories told in 2 Kings and the gospel, but the star of the show is faith. The trust in God of both Elijah and the widow he encountered turned a situation of deprivation and death into one of sustenance and life.

In praising the widow who gave her last two coins to the temple treasury, Jesus is not suggesting that you and I need to give away our last penny. Rather, Jesus acknowledges that it is often the poorest of the poor who show the greatest charity, who risk the most to be loving.

There is no higher calling, no loftier dream, and no greater goal than to live, breathe, and be poured out for Jesus Christ. —From Brother Andrew’s The Calling